Find an interesting example of visualization in a print medium that you encounter daily, and bring it into class.

These two designs and descriptions were voted to be the best in terms of matching affordances, likelihood to reduce errors, and if people wanted to own the watch:

Rachna Dhamija's watch

Ping Yee's watch

Kim Garrett and Sacha Pearson's watch (ppt)

Everyone's answers to Assignment 2

You can do this assignment in pairs if you like.

(1) In class, we discussed the manifold problems in the typical designs of digital watches. Some may be skeptical that alternative interfaces could show substantial improvement. Your goal is to show that it is possible to improve the design.

Design a digital watch with at least the following functionality: time, alarm, stopwatch. Concentrate on the interface, making sure that affordances are made use of appropriately. Comment on the design decisions you made in light of the user interface guidelines described in class and in the readings.

Make an informal sketch to illustrate your ideas. The entire writeup should be only one page or so.

(2) Redesign the agriculture figure in chapter 2 of the textbook (shown below) that we discussed in class. The goal is to make it more easily understandable more quickly to more people than it currently is. You can cut and paste from the existing image if you like. I suggest that you show the original and yours to a couple of other people and see which they find more understandable. Don't tell them one of them is yours or they might be biased to say they like yours better. You may want to use a likert scale (five point scale ranging, e.g., ranging from very easy to very difficult) with a set of three or four questions for both designs.

Turn in your alternate design, the design justifications for it, and a description of the peoples' reactions to both designs.